Contests And Giveaways Move To New, Fast Terrain Of Twitter

On July 1, Moonfruit was a below-the-radar Web-site building company with 400 followers on Twitter. Just a few days later, the London-based company had acquired 47,000 followers on the micro-blogging site, traffic to its home page had increased by 1,300% and the word "moonfruit" was popping up all over the Internet. The 52-employee firm says its new-found recognition was the result of a Twitter contest that went viral, and it's a marketing tactic increasingly being used by small businesses. While companies have used traditional contests for years to generate buzz, a Twitter contest is superior because "retweeting" spreads brand awareness even quicker, says Dan Zarrella, a social-media consultant based in Boston. Case in point: for three days "#Moonfruit" was on Twitter's trending topics list, which tracks the most popular words on the site...